Frank Smith sat patiently in his wheelchair outside the Haleʻiwa post office as his adult son, Brandon Delgado Dalumpinis, tried to figure out what to do next.
The pair had just taken a city bus there trying to get back to their senior living residence, Kupuna Home O Waialua, after spending the night on cots at the Leilehua High School cafeteria in Wahiawā. The Hawaiʻi National Guard had evacuated Smith, Delgado Dalumpinis and several of their neighbors Friday using a high-water military vehicle, with the photo of Smith and his dog in a wheelchair becoming one of the iconnic images of the evacuation.
Now it was Saturday and they were eager to get home to get the son’s migraine medication. Those headaches sometimes get so severe, Delgado Dalumpinis said, that they cause him to black out. They had other motivations, too: Smith’s wife lives with them at Kupuna Home O Waialua and was about to get discharged from The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu.
They expected to be able to transfer to another bus in Haleʻiwa to take them to Waialua. But the driver of that second route told them the bus couldn’t get past police cars parked across the road. Every route into their neighborhood was blocked off. They didn’t know when it would reopen…